Sprint and Clearwire claim rolling out WiMax gives them a clear time-to-market advantage over other wireless 4G services on the drawing board. Verizon Wireless plans to challenge that premise by deploying LTE in 2009 and to follow that with a femtocell with Wi-Fi rollout.Sprint Nextel and Clearwire have one WiMax deployment up and rolling in
Baltimore and at the October
debut of the nation's first 4G wireless service, Sprint Nextel and Clearwire officials
crowed that they have the time-to-market drop on larger rivals AT&T and
Verizon Wireless, which are just now pushing out their 3G services.
Verizon Wireless changed that scenario Dec. 9, announcing that it plans to
begin deploying 4G LTE (Long-Term Evolution) in 2009. Like WiMax, LTE promises
faster upload and download speeds than 3G deployments. LTE, though, is
theoretically much faster than WiMax.
Speaking at Cisco Systems' Cisco C-Scape conference in San
Francisco, Dick Lynch, executive vice president and CTO
of Verizon Communications, told conference attendees, "We expect that LTE
will actually be in service somewhere here in the U.S.
probably this time next year."
Verizon Wireless originally chose 2010 for the debut of its LTE, but after
testing LTE developed by Motorola, Verizon Wireless decided to accelerate the
schedule. Motorola, meanwhile, is covering its WiMax bet by having its LTE
solution support both LTE and WiMax.
Lynch said Verizon Wireless envisions its 4G LTE as expanding the reach of
wireless broadband beyond cell phones and laptops and plans to introduce a line
of femtocells shortly after the LTE debut. Lynch added that the femtocells,
which improve the quality of cell phone calls, would also include built-in
Wi-Fi.
"A femtocell of LTE or an access point of Wi-Fi is a really critical
component of the way customers want their broadband delivered," Lynch
said, noting the femtocells could be used by other electronics devices that don't
have cellular radios. "Broadband capabilities will be found in virtually
every electronics product out there."
Lynch said by adding Wi-Fi to femtocells, Verizon Wireless hopes to expand
its wireless data services to machine-to-machine applications such as cameras
that could automatically upload pictures to the Internet. Lynch said tapping
into the nascent machine-to-machine market could increase traffic "by an
order of magnitude" as compared with human subscribers.
Since debuting WiMax in October, Sprint
Nextel and Clearwire formally closed their $14.5 billion merger deal to
combine the two carriers' 4G wireless Internet businesses into a nationwide
WiMax network. The deal also includes a combined $3.2 billion investment by
Comcast, Intel, Time Warner Cable, Google and Bright House Networks.
Sprint and Clearwire hope their combined wireless spectrum will allow the
new Clearwire to achieve greater coverage, cost and operational efficiency, and
bandwidth utilization than either company could by operating alone. The new
Clearwire is targeting a network deployment that will cover between 120 million
and 140 million people in the United States
by the end of 2010. Sprint CEO Dan Hesse
said in October it would ultimately cost $3 billion to $5 billion to build out
the network.
"This is not simply about a time-to-market
advantage, but about having an amazing block of spectrum that is unencumbered
by legacy commercial uses and technology," Clearwire founder and Chairman
Craig O. McCaw said in a Dec. 1 statement. "It is a chance to do something
right the first time, with simplicity and incredible efficiencies. We are
building a wireless broadband network that will stand the test of both time and
competition. This is far and away the most exciting opportunity in wireless I
have seen since the beginning of cellular in 1983."
Mobile & Wireless 
